Contact
by alice in a coma
Summary: Lysander loves Hermia; he really does. He would never do anything to hurt her...especially not cheat on her with her best friend. One-shot. Lysander/Hermia. Lysander/Helena


So...please don't flame me for the pairing because honestly I know it's really weird and it's not even a couple that I really support (I LOVE Helena and Demetrius together!), but I've always wondered what it'd be like to put Helen and Lysander together in some abstract way like this, so...here we are. A short Lysander/Helena one-shot.

A couple things you should know: in this "version," Lysander and Hermia fight over the not-sleeping-together thing. Also, all of the fics I end up writing for Midsummer will be set **modern day**, unless I say otherwise.

So, without further ado, please enjoy and review!

* * *

Lysander was a good guy. Really, he was. Ask anyone and they would tell you that he would do _anything_ for Hermia. But, being the hormonal teenage boy that he was, he occasionally got miffed about the lack of..._sexual activity _that took place in their relationship.

He didn't like to confront her about it. After all, it _was_ her body and therefore it _was_ her choice—he completely respected that—but it was times like these that he questioned why exactly she refused to sleep with him. They were going on three years in their relationship, for heaven's sake! He didn't know anyone who'd lasted that long.

The only times it really got to him were when his friends gave him trouble about it.

"Man, 'Sander, I can't believe you haven't banged that chick already," Adrian (who was obnoxious anyway) frequently said when the subject of girls and Hermia came up. Lysander always tried to brush it off, but he couldn't deny that it irked him slightly.

Getting in Hermia's pants hadn't been his design tonight, but when she had lain down, looking so…well, beautiful, it was suddenly all he could think about. He had thought, perhaps, that he could persuade her. After all, they'd be married in a few days time, and who would ever possibly find out? Plenty of people did it before they were married, anyway! Why _should_ they wait?

Hermia, however, didn't see it the same way, and it escalated into a fight—one of the few they'd ever had in the course of their relationship. It ended with Lysander storming off into the forest without her. It was, in actuality, to simply cool down before going back and apologizing—because, really, Hermia was right—but he'd never let _her_ know that.

He had been walking for almost ten minutes when he heard something that sounded like a sob. Lysander froze, worried for a moment that Hermia had tried to follow him and gotten herself in trouble. He had heard Hermia's sob plenty of times before, though, and when he listened again, he determined that, though it was familiar, it wasn't Hermia who was crying. Curious, Lysander stepped toward the noise.

Part of him wasn't surprised to find Helena Nedar sitting up against a tree, bawling her eyes out in a way only one thing could make her.

_Damn Demetrius, _he thought as he gazed at her, for surely that was the cause.

As much as he had seen Hermia cry, Lysander was pretty sure he had seen more of Helena's tears than any human should. He supposed he liked to comfort her because he _pitied_ her. She had never done anything wrong—if you got to know her, she really was a wonderful girl. He often thought Demetrius was an idiot for throwing her away.

"Helena?" he asked, stepping forward quietly. She jumped up, startled. Catching sight of Lysander, she vainly attempted to hide her tears.

"L-lys-sander," she said shakily, not even bothering to stand up. She didn't say anything more, and he didn't know if there was anything more to say.

So instead, he sat beside her and tried to comfort her. He put an arm around her shoulders and she sobbed into his shirt. He found, suddenly, that he didn't mind. He also found, strangely, for the first time since he was thirteen, that he thought she was beautiful. Even in her sobbing, dirty mess, she was beautiful.

He didn't know what he was doing when he quietly whispered, "Helen," but as she looked up, he swiftly placed his lips on hers. At first she drew back, frightened, but he pressed his lips to hers again, and she found herself kissing him back.

Hungrily, he pushed her back against the tree and let his tongue slide over her bottom lip. An unbidden moan came up from the back of her throat as she tugged him closer. He found he didn't mind.

It was madness, they both knew, that they were doing this—in the middle of the forest, no less!—when they both had other people they cared for, other people they loved, other people who had driven them to be traipsing about this forest in the first place. But Helena knew now she would probably never get Demetrius back, and Lysander, for the moment, couldn't seem to recall Hermia's face. The need for human contact was something that overpowered love and commitment at the moment, and later Helena knew she would blame it on a tragic coincidence that he stumbled upon her in that forest.

Lysander didn't think about Hermia as Helena lifted her shirt over her head. He didn't imagine that it was Hermia's hands that tangled themselves in his hair. He knew for a fact that it was Helena's pants he was tossing away. And he knew he would never be able to make up for it, but for now, all he could think about was Helena and how good the skin-on-skin contact felt.

She cried as he took her innocence, and Lysander worried for a moment that he had done it wrong. But her cries quickly turned to moans, and he lost himself to whispering what should have been another girl's praises in her ear.

When it was over, he rolled off of her and lay next to her, staring up at the dark treetops. It should have been romantic, those first few minutes after, but Lysander realized very quickly that this wasn't the girl he should—or could—be romantic with. He glanced over at Helena and was glad to find that she wasn't staring back.

She was, after all, the sensible one. She knew better than to expect anything. And he had nothing he could give her.

As he thought this, she stood up and began collecting their clothes. She dumped Lysander's in a pile before him, not daring to look him in the eye. Slowly, she pulled her clothes back on and only glanced at him once before turning to walk away.

"Helena…" Lysander attempted, but he fell short because he didn't know what he could possibly say to her that would make this any less wrong.

She turned and finally looked him in the eye. There was pain there—a pain he didn't think was ever going to go away because no matter how many boys she had the one she loved would never be hers—but she shook her head at him.

"Go back to Hermia, Lysander," she told him. "She's probably looking for you."

She walked away without another word, leaving Lysander to stare after her and wonder how the night had started out with so much promise and ended as such a disaster.

Walking back to Hermia, he tried to remember the dream he'd had when they departed that morning of a life with her in a sweet little house somewhere with dark-haired children and a dog.

But that dream was gone now, only to be replaced by the forbidden dream of a red-haired girl too smart for her own good and too lonely to deny him anything.

He didn't sleep that night.


End file.
